Word: zhou
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...golden spires. There's no hint of the regal festivals that once took place right here, viewed from this same vantage by mighty kings beneath parasols of red silk. But there is an eyewitness report of life at the gilded Angkor court. In fact, it is the only one: Zhou Daguan's A Record of Cambodia: The Land and Its People...
...Little is known about the elusive Zhou, a Chinese contemporary of Dante, who spent nearly a year in Ganpuzhi (or Cambodia, a land of "southern barbarians," frighteningly "coarse, ugly and very black," according to Zhou) before sailing back to China in July 1297. He was born in the 1270s in the bustling, cosmopolitan port of Wenzhou and was recruited, possibly as an interpreter, for an official mission to deliver an imperial edict to Khmer King Indravarman III on behalf of the Mongol Yuan Emperor Chengzong in 1295. That was the same year that a ragged, unrecognizable Marco Polo arrived back...
...chronicle of a diplomatic sojourn, Zhou's patchy account reads at times like an official dossier instead of an exotic travelogue about a perfumed and misty land. He lists Cambodia's trade goods (kingfisher feathers, rosewood and beeswax in return for Chinese pewter, celadon and combs), stripping its flora and fauna of the romance of place in a manner more reminiscent of a CIA Factbook entry than Polo's Il Milione. "For vegetables," he writes, "they have onions, mustard, chives, eggplants, watermelons, winter gourds, snake gourds, and amaranth. They do not have radishes, lettuce, chicory, or spinach...
...Focusing on the symbolic power of money, the study's authors, Xinyue Zhou of Sun Yat-Sen University, Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota and Roy Baumeister of Florida State University, started with a simple hypothesis: reminders of money can alter how people experience social interactions - especially social acceptance and rejection. (See 10 things to buy during the recession...
Bottom line: the dollar faces a longer-term challenge, and the big players know it. Echoing a call made by Zhou Xiaochuan, its governor, in March, China's central bank advocated a new global reserve currency in its annual financial-stability report released last Friday. Raising concerns of a move away from the dollar as the world's reserve, the proposal for a "super-sovereign" coin nudged down the greenback vs. a host of major currencies. That may have been a tad more impact than Zhou was seeking: with something like two-thirds of China's roughly $2 trillion...